Whishaw is not tested by this verbatim retelling of Hujar’s day in hip 1970s New York, recounting encounters with Ginsburg, Burroughs and Leibowitz

Peter Hujar was a brilliant photographer and stylish gay man of the 1970s and 80s, associated with Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe and part of a hip New York coterie of artists and intellectuals. In 1974, he took part in a kind of documentary nonfiction project undertaken by author Linda Rosenkrantz, in which he simply came to her apartment and recounted into a tape machine everything that happened to him on a certain day.

The tape is lost, but the typescript survived, published three years ago as Peter Hujar’s Day and now filmed by director Ira Sachs as a verbatim-cinema chamber piece entirely within Rosenkrantz’s apartment, sometimes in different rooms or pensively up on the roof looking out at the skyline, shot to make it...